Abstract
ESSENCE is a family of cryptographic hash functions, accepted to the first round of NIST’s SHA-3 competition. This paper presents the first known attacks on ESSENCE. We present a semi-free-start collision attack on 31 out of 32 rounds of ESSENCE-512, invalidating the design claim that at least 24 rounds of ESSENCE are secure against differential cryptanalysis. We develop a novel technique to satisfy the first nine rounds of the differential characteristic. Non-randomness in the outputs of the feedback function F is used to construct several distinguishers on a 14-round ESSENCE block cipher and the corresponding compression function, each requiring only 217 output bits. This observation is extended to key-recovery attacks on the block cipher. Next, we show that the omission of round constants allows slid pairs and fixed points to be found. These attacks are independent of the number of rounds. Finally, we suggest several countermeasures against these attacks, while still keeping the design simple and easy to analyze.
This work was supported in part by the IAP Program P6/26 BCRYPT of the Belgian State (Belgian Science Policy), and in part by the European Commission through the ICT program under contract ICT-2007-216676 ECRYPT II.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Biham, E., Chen, R.: Near-Collisions of SHA-0. In: Franklin, M. (ed.) CRYPTO 2004. LNCS, vol. 3152, pp. 290–305. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
De Cannière, C., Rechberger, C.: Finding SHA-1 Characteristics: General Results and Applications. In: Lai, X., Chen, K. (eds.) ASIACRYPT 2006. LNCS, vol. 4284, pp. 1–20. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Cramer, R. (ed.): EUROCRYPT 2005. LNCS, vol. 3494. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Dinur, I., Shamir, A.: Side Channel Cube Attacks on Block Ciphers. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2009/127 (2009), http://eprint.iacr.org/
Dziembowski, S., Pietrzak, K.: Leakage-Resilient Cryptography. In: FOCS, pp. 293–302. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2008)
Grassl, M.: Tables of Linear Codes and Quantum Codes (June 2008), http://www.codetables.de/
Joux, A., Peyrin, T.: Hash Functions and the (Amplified) Boomerang Attack. In: Menezes, A. (ed.) CRYPTO 2007. LNCS, vol. 4622, pp. 244–263. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Klima, V.: Tunnels in Hash Functions: MD5 Collisions Within a Minute. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2006/105 (2006), http://eprint.iacr.org/
Martin, J.W.: ESSENCE: A Family of Cryptographic Hashing Algorithms. Submitted to the NIST SHA-3 hash function competition, http://www.math.jmu.edu/~martin/essence/Supporting_Documentation/essence_compression.pdf (2009/01/20)
Martin, J.W.: Personal Communication (2009)
Matsui, M.: Linear Cryptoanalysis Method for DES Cipher. In: Helleseth, T. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1993. LNCS, vol. 765, pp. 386–397. Springer, Heidelberg (1994)
Menezes, A., van Oorschot, P.C., Vanstone, S.A.: Handbook of Applied Cryptography. CRC Press, Boca Raton (1996)
National Institute of Standards and Technology. Announcing Request for Candidate Algorithm Nominations for a New Cryptographic Hash Algorithm (SHA-3) Family. Federal Register 27(212), 62212–62220 (November 2007), http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/documents/FR_Notice_Nov07.pdf (2008/10/17)
Naya-Plasencia, M., Roeck, A., Peyrin, T., Aumasson, J.-P., Leurent, G., Meier, W.: Cryptanalysis of ESSENCE (2009) (Unpublished)
Pietrzak, K.: A Leakage-Resilient Mode of Operation. In: Joux, A. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 2009. LNCS, vol. 5479, pp. 462–482. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Preneel, B.: Analysis and design of cryptographic hash functions. PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (1993)
Wang, X., Lai, X., Feng, D., Chen, H., Yu, X.: Cryptanalysis of the Hash Functions MD4 and RIPEMD. In: Cramer (ed.) [3], pp. 1–18
Wang, X., Yu, H.: How to Break MD5 and Other Hash Functions. In: Cramer (ed.) [3], pp. 19–35
Wang, X., Yu, H., Yin, Y.L.: Efficient Collision Search Attacks on SHA-0. In: Shoup, V. (ed.) CRYPTO 2005. LNCS, vol. 3621, pp. 1–16. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mouha, N. et al. (2010). Cryptanalysis of the ESSENCE Family of Hash Functions. In: Bao, F., Yung, M., Lin, D., Jing, J. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology. Inscrypt 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6151. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16342-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16342-5_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-16341-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-16342-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)